KEY POINTS:
The expulsion of Michael Green, New Zealand's High Commissioner to Fiji, is clearly fall-out from New Zealand's rigid and unchanging stance on the Fiji situation in the months after the military takeover last December.
Fiji's strategic importance in the South Pacific, its long and friendly relationship with New Zealand and the innate complexity of its polity - which New Zealand must know better than any other country in the world - merits a far more sensitive, mature and realistic approach than the one-pronged isolationist strategy that it has relentlessly pursued so far.
Following widespread condemnation and a slew of sanctions by the international community and donor agencies that all but isolated it in the weeks after the coup, the military-led interim administration has been under great pressure from all quarters to demonstrate that it is serious about bringing back a democratic government within a credible timeframe.
In the past couple of months, it has engaged with a Pacific Islands Forum-co-ordinated Joint Working Group that is mandated to put together a realistic roadmap to a return to democracy.
Late last month, the interim government updated the working group on the progress of the independent technical assessment of an election timetable for Fiji. The independent team will advise on the minimum reasonable time required to prepare for the next election. Paul Harris, a former chief executive of New Zealand's Electoral Commission, heads the team.
In a bid to automate the electoral process, the interim administration has sought an assurance from the Indian Government to acquire electronic voting machines that have proved so successful and quickened the post-polling process in India.
In any case, it has committed to the European Community that it will hold elections no later than early 2009. One of the administration's key members has even hinted at a possible earlier date. Also, earlier this month, it lifted the emergency provisions that were put in place after the military action.
While some of these seemingly conciliatory moves have been recognised and praised in the media by key New Zealand politicians, such as Foreign Affairs Minister Winston Peters, the country's policy-making machinery seems to have failed to take note of them in terms of altering the present confrontationist line.
New Zealand's travel bans on members of the interim government and those associated with it have hit the administration the most.
Though there is justification for the bans on the interim government's ministers - who have voluntarily taken up their posts - it is difficult to justify the continued ban on senior career bureaucrats, most of them having been appointed plainly by government fiat.
They have not been in a position to refuse taking up the posts, for that would risk putting an end to their careers. And because of their long stints with the government, most have spent substantial lengths of time in New Zealand and Australia and own properties there. Many have spouses and close family members settled in the two countries as citizens. Some of them are taxpayers, too.
Also, the blanket travel ban on anyone associated with the interim administration has discouraged a large number of able and experienced Fiji citizens from taking up administrative and executive positions in the country's statutory bodies. The ban would effectively prevent them from being with their close families living overseas.
If that seemed like a successful strategy to frustrate the interim administration's ministers and bureaucrats so far, it is clearly beginning to unravel. The Green episode - a first in New Zealand's diplomatic history - is a signal.
Though Bainimarama and his foreign minister have refused to reveal the real reasons for the expulsion, citing the provisions of the Geneva Convention, it is hard not to see it as the desperate reaction of a regime pushed to the wall.
Fiji continues to rumble ominously. Its tourism-driven economy is reeling, hotel and resort occupancy rates having plummeted. More people are out of work and the unemployment rate is climbing.
Human rights problems persist; there has been no closure in the three custody deaths since the coup. And, as is often the case, it is hard to make sense of the prevailing political reality, particularly in terms of the power play within the Army.
In these circumstances, it is urgent for New Zealand - and Australia - to reassess their rather school-masterly behave-or-else strategy, especially at a time when the troubled island nation seems to be taking some early steps towards the return of democracy following elections in the next 18 months or so - something which the two countries have been pressing for in the first place.
New Zealand is without doubt a major influence in Fiji and a country well loved by Fiji's people. The Government must capitalise on this goodwill and inject a dose of pragmatism and sensitivity in its policy outlook towards Fiji's changing post-coup environment.
Prime Minister Clark's announcement after the cabinet meeting yesterday that the Government would initiate any retaliation on the Green expulsion after watching the interim administration's progress towards holding elections in 2008-09 is a much-needed velvet glove over the its hitherto iron-fisted Fiji policy - an eminently sensible move.
